An Unusual Letter With Cricket Associations 1854

 Previously having had the good fortune of acquiring two American cricket CDVs’, one of which pictures baseball’s Harry Wright (see blog posting dated March 7, 2025) I realized how little I knew of cricket, cricket’s origins and of its ties to baseball. In the last year and a half I have made a study of American and British cricket and happened across the letter which is the subject of this blog.

This ‘letter’, even with its cricket content, is more importantly a study of man’s ability to overcome life’s obstacles, no matter how great. A study in perseverance, in times that were indeed so much more difficult than today.

Richard Walker, a cricketer with no hands. At age twelve (1843) Richard Walker had an accident at Cornelius Nicholson’s Burnside Paper Mill, losing his hands between heavy rollers (Cumbria County Archives). He persevered in learning to write and draw and went further, to be able to play cricket.  

His handwritten letter reads:

“Written by Rd (Richard) Walker who lost both his hands at Burnside Paper Mill Aug 9^th 1843. Signed ‘Rd Walker, Sine Manibus (without hands) Aug 18^th 1854’. He continues, “R.W. can play at Cricket, is a very good Batsman and can Bowl very well, has occasionally partly shaved himself and has often Mowed a swaith in rank with other Mowers – and can do anything almost than anyone else can – And has taught the grammar school Haveley for 2 years. R.W.”

An unusual and thought provoking letter with sports associations.

Rare Tiffany Sterling Silver Football Themed Flask 1891/1892

 A wonderfully detailed, high relief, acid etched, Tiffany rugby football flask made in 1891/1892 for Dr. William Palmer Wesselhoeft. Wesselhoeft was a Harvard trained physician (MD in 1857) with ties to Boston University School of Medicine, where he and another four or five of his close Wesselhoeft relatives, who were also MDs, were working. This flask was presented to him before his planned world travels in 1893-1894, as inscribed on the flask. Also inscribed on the flask, translated from German “Travel around the world” and “Never full or never empty”. There are records of him in Rome and Venice and of having to abandon plans for going up the Nile in 1894.  

Interestingly, his son, William Fessenden Wesselhoeft (also a trained Harvard physician) played for the Harvard varsity football team in 1882 and 1884 according to The H Book of Harvard Athletics  and contemporary newspaper accounts. W.F. originally rowed crew but in 1882 "Harvard has taken its biggest boating men...and put them in training for the football team", and a football player he became. 

Tiffany’s craftsman, lacking familiarity with rugby football borrowed from contemporary publication’s illustrations. We have not done a serious search as yet, but should be able to identify the source of the etching on this flask. Publications such as The Century Illustrated Monthly magazine, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated New York Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly commonly had such illustrations, and would be the best place for us to start.

This flask is one of four football related flasks in our collection, and the second made by Tiffany (see post dated September 28, 2014). Also see posts dated November 6, 2022 (Walter Camp's personal flask) and June 15, 2015 (association football flask).